Microsoft rebrands Office 365 bundles it with AI and cloud-powered features

At a virtual event today, Microsoft announced it is expanding and rebranding its Office 365 subscription service into a new ‘Microsoft 365′ service, available April 21. As you might assume from the name change, the new subscription service seeks to expand its utility beyond ‘just’ your work life, and instead become an all-in-one solution for making your day-to-day life a little more efficient.

On April 21, Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions (up to six people) will replace Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home. The pricing will remain the same: $7 per month and $10 per month, respectively. The Microsoft 365 plans include everything already in Office 365, including desktop Office apps, 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person, 60 Skype minutes, security features, technical support, plus the new Office features also announced today. Those features are spread across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. (Even Edge is getting new consumer features, though the browser doesn’t require a Microsoft 365 subscription, of course.)

If Microsoft 365 sounds familiar, that’s because Microsoft 365 debuted for businesses back in July 2017. The more expensive Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions include business-specific security and management functionality. Half a billion people use the free Office applications and services (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive) for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web. Microsoft shared today that more than 38 million consumers subscribe to Office 365 (up from 37.2 million in January). By comparison, there are over 200 million monthly active Office 365 business users.